


Echo, Reverberation

by icarus_chained



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt, Fear, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Love/Hate, Protectiveness, Rescue, Villains, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 04:55:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6738946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cisco has a dream (it <i>has</i> to be a dream, a nightmare) where Zoom is routed by the ghost of Eobard Thawne. It's not a reprieve. Even in a dream, it's not a reprieve. Thawne will always be the greater of their monsters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echo, Reverberation

**Author's Note:**

> Frantic bit of a thing that came out of nowhere. I wanted Thawne vs Zoom, and by now we all know how caught up I am with Cisco, Harry, and the history with Thawne. So. Um. Apologies in advance.

"It's a nightmare. This is a nightmare. It isn't real."

It felt like one. It had that dreamy, dilated, blurred-around-the-edges feeling to it. Like a vibe, but different. More disconnected, disjointed. Real. Images jumped at him out of it. The blue-black blur of Zoom. Red. Barry. Smashed to the ground. Again, and again. Caitlin, somewhere out of sight. Screaming for Zoom to stop. Like before, but not like before. This was different. Not a memory, not a vibe. A nightmare. Not the same.

"Where's Wells!" Joe roared somewhere beside him. "Damn it, damn the man, where is he! Barry's getting murdered out there!"

" _Here_ ," a voice rasped, ragged and torn around the edges, and Harry barrelled past him into Cisco's line of sight. Something flashed on the edge of Cisco's senses as he did, something went sharp and bright about the sight of him. Harry looked wrong. Glowing, vibrating. Something, he didn't know what. Harry looked _wrong_. He barrelled past, beam rifle in hand, and flung himself between Barry and Zoom.

Not the plan. Wrong plan. This was wrong. All of it was wrong. What was _happening_?

Zoom flashed up to Harry. Smacked the rifle contemptuously out of his hands, smashed a hand into his collarbone to seize and shake him by the shirt. Barry made a noise on the ground behind them. Horror, shock, afraid for Harry's life. Something stretched between them, a white blur like an overexposed film. The sense of wrongness pulsed. This thing, this dream, thin and on the point of tearing. Cisco felt it, felt everything around him stretch. Zoom raised his other hand, black and furious. Set it to vibrating, raised it towards Harry's chest. Horror threatened to tear the world like tissue paper. And then. And then.

Then something flashed in Harry's eyes. A light, a red light. The world froze, sharp and crystalline. Cisco stared in breathless, empty horror. Harry's eyes went red, and a sharp, familiar smile creased his face.

"Oh no," Harry said, in a warped and distorted voice, while Zoom stared incomprehendingly at him. "No, thank you. Not from you. You haven't earned that."

Then his hand was there. A flash of red lightning up from his side, a fist powering into Zoom's abdomen with way more force than should have been possible. Way more force, way more _speed_. Zoom shunted back, his grip broken, and Harry landed lightly on his feet in front of him. Rocked forward, poised on the balls of his feet. That sly smile flickered back and forth across his features. His eyes were brightly, laughingly red.

"... Wells?" Zoom asked. Jay, rather, his own distortion blanked away by shock. Confusion. He tilted his head, a monster suddenly wary, faced with something that stank unlooked-for of its own danger. "What are you ... Wells?"

Harry sneered. Not Harry. The thing with Harry's face. "Yes and no," he said, waving one hand slightly in a cocky, ironic salute. "Not the right question, you see. Not the right universe. Come now. Didn't you do your homework before you decided to play with other people's things?"

Zoom only stared blankly. He did know, he _should_ know, they had told him, but maybe it had never meant enough for him to connect the dots in a hurry. Not so everyone else. They knew. They figured it out immediately.

" _Thawne_ ," Cisco breathed, the first of them, his voice tiny and crushed and horrified. Barry was trying to move. Cisco saw it. He was trying to drag himself away from them, two figures in black, one of them their enemy and one of them so much worse than that. Harry. Harry's face. Cisco felt grief bubble up through him, felt pain and horror and a kind of loss that he never had before. He'd never known their Dr. Wells. His death had only meant something distantly and in hindsight. This. This was _Harry_. This was Thawne and this was Harry. The world was grey around the edges. Cisco couldn't breathe.

The monster looked at him. Harry's face. Thawne's eyes, placid and paternal and proud in that mild, distracted way of his. Approving of Cisco's acuity. Proud and happy to be recognised. It stabbed. The sight of it stabbed at Cisco's chest.

"Exactly right, Cisco," he said, the smile flickering forward again. "You always were among the fastest. Brightest mind of an age. Or one of them."

"What do you _want_?" Zoom snarled. Interrupting, a blue-black flash darting between Cisco and Harr-- _Dr. Wells_. It was relief Cisco felt. A punch in the gut. Thawne's attention flicked back to the second monster in the room. The rest of them clawed their way back to breathing in the wake of it.

"You're playing with my things," Thawne continued mildly. With an undercurrent to it. Not a vibration, not a distortion. An emotion, instead, something black and bright and seething. Proprietary rage. A bright and monstrous sort of possession. "You come from another world. You use my death and come here, try to feed on what I've built. You try to un _make_ that which belongs to me. I don't like that. I'm not fond of that at all."

Zoom flashed forwards, a challenge and a sneer, face to evil face. Thawne rocked back on his heels, smiling bright and sneering, giving not one inch. Not an attack. Neither of them. An argument instead, words and wounds and rights to claim. Zoom snarled into Harry's face.

"You're _dead_ ," he hissed. "Wiped away before ever I came. This has nothing to do with you. You forfeited your rights the moment you lost."

Thawne tilted his head, a smug little 'oh?' expression on his face. "Am I?" he asked lightly. "Am I dead? I was erased from existence, true, but perhaps such things are never so permanent as we might like. You play around with other worlds, Zoom, and in response to you people play around with time, and _sometimes_ ... sometimes echoes creep up out of the cracks. This universe wants me to live. It knows what belongs to me. It knows that you _don't_ belong. And so."

He spread his hands. Voila. A ghost, an echo, wearing the murdered remnant of a friend to chastise the face of an enemy. The universe's black, black joke on all of them. Cisco pressed his fist into his mouth. He bit down helplessly around his tears.

Zoom had no such compunctions. He _roared_ , clenched his fists and tightened his core and let it rip furious and trembling out of him, and then he _struck_. Childish, petulant, furious at this smug, impossible play actor. He lashed out, blue-black and flickering, and tried to tear Harry's body apart. 

Thawne refused him. A flash of speed and lightning, red-black against the blue, a flickering afterimage of a lightning strike in hell. They stayed close. That tinge of unreality once again. The pair of them, twin and opposite blurs, kept tight and close in amongst them all. Thawne matched Zoom blow for blow. He kept himself one laughing step ahead, a mockery of precession. Reverse Flash. Equal and opposite, whether against the real Flash or some other-universe pretender. A fragment of the speed force itself, motivated by an evil will and come back to haunt them all. He kept himself ahead of Zoom. He didn't let him land a single blow.

Then he tired of the game. He flashed _forwards_ instead of back, drove towards Zoom instead of away from him. Drove low and planted himself, went still and motionless as a photograph, teeth and savagery painting his face in the stillness. Zoom ploughed into him, drove himself gut first onto Thawne's fist. Impaled himself, almost, momentum onto momentum, and an endless second later dropped broken and wheezing onto the floor. 

Thawne stood over him. The mildness of his facade cracked open, the perpetual hatred of the real person staring out at them from behind it once again. He sneered down at Zoom with nothing but a rabid, shaking hatred in his face. 

"You have _no right_ ," he hissed, the distortion warping and grinding the words to pieces, his eyes baleful in his face. "Barry Allen is _mine_. He belongs to me. I _made_ him. You have no right to come to my world and play these games. I didn't send for you! I didn't give you _leave_."

His hand rose with a scream, a blur of rage and hatred. Zoom's trick, Thawne's trick, but Thawne had used it first. Learned it first, hundreds of years in the future, and used it without a qualm every opportunity since. Cisco felt the tearing in his own chest. He felt the memory of it, the rending and the screaming, the breaking of a heart all over again. He watched the snarl on Harry's face as the hand descended towards its prey. The pain was all he felt.

Zoom moved. Speed, terror, some horrified burst of a survival instinct. He surged upright with all the force of a body burning speed and Velocity 9, spun and twisted and seized Thawne's arm in one brutal, grasping hand. Thawne's eyes went wide, a grimacing flash of pain, and then Zoom drove his other hand with all his might into Thawne's, into _Harry's_ face. Cisco cried out. He heard Barry crying too, Caitlin somewhere behind them. He heard all of them scream as one person, and wondered vaguely who it was they were screaming _for_.

The world went still in that second. Completely, impossibly still. Thawne ... shattered. His face, Harry's face, it split apart, a great blue light shining from the cracks. The pieces smiled. His body parted like a pixilated morph, swayed open and closed with that blue light shining in the gaps, flickering like a distressed mirage. He pulled himself together, his eyes flickering red and blue and red again, the seams in his shattered face rippling closed. Zoom stared at him, horrified. Zoom stumbled back away. 

Thawne smiled absently after him. He brushed with delicate, careful hands at his own front. Setting himself back to rights. Everyone stared at him in mute, frozen horror.

"What?" he asked, mild and bright and sneering as ever. "I'm dead, remember? Erased from all existence. Such things are not so easily undone." His lip lifted, curled. "Sidestepped, however. Detoured around. That is a different question. The Speed Force may be ever so accommodating, when it comes to things it wants to come to pass."

He shifted then. Flickered, settled. Lifted his head, straightened his spine, rolled his shoulders loose and ready. Changed his stance, moved his feet apart and settled down into a ready, roiling thing. His lips curled back from his teeth, his hands held low and vibrating out from his sides. He looked at Zoom. He laughed at him, wild and hateful and sneering.

"Time to go, little boy," he said, Harrison Wells' voice coming low and laughing from his teeth. "Daddy's come to collect his things. Wouldn't want to be caught playing with them, would we?"

Zoom _bolted_. Jay, Hunter Zolomon, whichever of them. Something in that struck way below the belt, sliced in and ravaged something oozing. Zoom staggered like his gut had been ripped out of him. He didn't say anything, didn't even breathe, he just _ran_. Turned and bolted, instantly and instinctively. There was a thunderous crack of black and blue, a world left rocking and unsteady in his wake. He ran away. Thawne snarled his triumph after him.

And then. And then. Thawne stood there in the centre of them. Harry's face, Harry's body, ragged and dark and worn, unshattered in their midst. They looked at him. Cisco felt himself drift distantly to his knees. It was Barry Thawne looked to first. 

"... You need to get a move on, Barry Allen," the echo of their mentor told him gently, that sliding, unnatural motion about him once again. He turned, those blue cracks sliding and clicking closed inside him, and looked with reproving patience down at Barry. "I can't guide you forever. Dead and gone, and all the time travel in the world won't help you before too long. I can give you time, but not much else. You have to get up. You have to beat him down. I won't have something of mine lose to a thing like _that_."

Barry stared up at him, white and horrified where he lay. "You ..." he said, stammering fitfully. "What _are_ you? How did you come back?"

Thawne laughed silently, a bright seam of wicked humour in his face. "You belong to me, Barry," he said, with the air of one explaining a simple and universal truth. "I made you. Piece by piece. I came to kill you, and I made you instead, was made by you in turn. Time bent itself into a _pretzel_ to ensure it. We are bound together, you and I. Time, the Speed Force, the universe itself, all of them go out of their way to make it so. I will come back for you. I will _always_ come back for you. You're a part of me, and one that I don't hate quite the way I used to. You need to grow stronger, Barry. You need to get faster. You need to _run_."

" _Harry_ ," someone said. Not Barry, Barry was lying still in stunned, encompassing horror. But someone said it, some voice cried it out low and breathless, and it was only when Thawne turned to him that Cisco realised it had been him. He wanted to be scared at that. He wanted to be terrified. He couldn't remember how, so he repeated himself instead. "Where's Harry? What did you do to him? What did you _do_?"

Thawne flickered at him. Distorted, bemused, a little shocked. That Cisco spoke? That he wasn't scared? That he was asking about Harry? One or all, it didn't matter. Thawne turned to him. Flashed close in a strange, staggered blur of blue and red, falling to pieces in the interim. Cisco stared up at him. He blinked the tears out of his eyes.

"I knew you'd turn out this way, Cisco," the ghost said quietly. A strange, bemused smile on his face, joy held at one remove and blinked at oddly in puzzlement. "A great and honourable destiny. Something inside you. Not just power. I knew it then. I told you I gave it out of love."

Cisco ignored that. Ignored all of it. His heart was a sodden, aching lump in his chest, and he only had one priority. One concern, one grief remaining. The face above him hadn't meant anything before, not in its own right. It had been a corpse, not a person. Now it was. Now it meant something. He needed to _know_.

"What. Did you do. To Harry," he said again, a hardness and a fury to it. A shaking thing, a hate that even at his worst this man had never pulled from him before. He scrambled to his feet, reached out a hand molten and vibrating with energy. Reached as though to shove it through a chest, to break a heart and pull his answers from it. Thawne stared at him, a stunned, wild pride on Harry's face. Cisco broke, cried snarling: "What did you _do_?"

"... Nothing," Thawne said, soft and gentle and full of love. His face was calm and fractured around his smile. "I did nothing to him, Cisco. I only needed him asleep while I borrowed his face to get in close. I'm long past the point of needing _Harrison Wells_ to bear me up." He chuckled lightly, reached out to tap a shoulder and point Cisco another way. Point to a figure behind him, staggered and hunched against a doorframe, blood black and sticky over a white, stunned face. "I'm here to help you, Cisco. All of you. I don't need to take your things."

"... _People_ ," Cisco rasped, staring at Harry blindly, catching and clinging to the dark horror in the man's gaze desperately. "They're _people_. They're not things." He felt more than saw Thawne shrug behind him. He caught it out of the corner of his eye.

"Either or," the ghost said mildly. Uncaring, unconcerned. The way he always was. The way they'd never seen until so very much too late. "I won't break them on you, anyway. They're the key to making you stronger. You share that with Barry, you know. The things you love were always the way to make you better."

Cisco pressed his hands up against his face. He rocked himself slightly, while Harry straightened himself slowly and achingly upright, glaring hatred at the thing behind Cisco all the way. "This is a nightmare," Cisco whispered. He clung to the thought, clutched it desperately in his hands. "It's a nightmare. It isn't real. This _isn't real_."

A hand rested gently on his shoulder, fractured in blue and flickering with red lightning. Thawne leaned against his ear and whispered to him quietly. The world fractured around them, stretched and sheared apart in a blur of unreality. Dreaming. A dream, a nightmare. A nightmare all along. It had to be. A nightmare, not a vibe. Cisco bolted upright in his bed, hands clawed and scream tearing its way bloodily out of his throat. The words followed him anyway. Followed him up into the light, into the arms of a terrified Jesse and the flustered, bewildered man who wore his enemy's face. Thawne's words followed him, all the way up into the light of day.

"What does it say, then," the echo whispered gently. "What does it say that even in your nightmare ... I'm the one coming to save you?"


End file.
